When will you team up with iSpot - https://www.ispotnature.org/?
It’ll benefit you both to share resources and further the advancement of categorising observations made about our fauna and flora. Especially observations made in the UK.
Good for you & good for everyone!
The entire South African community of iSpot split off of there and joined Inaturalist. I’m sure they will have thoughts but they are probably mostly asleep now.
In general there are lots of other things out there like Inaturalist. There’s been a trend for many of them to merge into iNat except ebird which is also huge and serves a different role. Which is good in a lot of ways but also doesn’t mean we should try to go gobble up every other biodiversity monitoring effort.
Collaboration is good but I’m not sure how that would work other than merging. Does iSpot share with GBIF? I’m assuming so. If so we more or less are already collaborating by adding to the same database :)
Edit: Oops it’s actually afternoon there not the middle of the night. well, maybe they are taking naps.
There’s another thread where @tonyrebelo explained why South Africa moved to iNat.
Because ispot wasn’t updating?
Are you asking whether iNat would combine records with iSpot?
Here are some stats (focused on iSpot’s home base, the UK):
On the 27th Feb 2019:
iNat England users added 1,407 observations.
iNat Europe users added 7,864 obs,
iNat Global users added 52,772 obs
iSpot UK&Ireland users added 75 obs
iSpot Global users added 83 obs
So I’m not sure what you mean by team up, what is more likely to happen is iSpot users will drift to iNat.
I was with with South African community of iSpot for 5years until their IT team destroyed the community by removing all notifications of changes (comments, new IDs etc), which resulted in the SA community moving to iNat. I assume they have now fixed their unforgivable (IMO) error of judgement, but the functionality of the iSpot site remains rudimentary compared to iNat. The only thing I miss about iSpot is the species interactions. Please keep species interactions high on your ‘features to add’ list, Team iNat!
I agree with @vynbos. iSpot became unusable, and definitely not a pleasure to work in. My own troubles began at the moment that iSpot rebooted their database after the changes @vynbos refers to.
My South African observations were not moved to iNat from iSpot, and I used to go into iSpot regularly to check something. Not any more. It seems to have become progressively worse and I am now unable to sign in. I can still perform checks on my user ID, but it does not seem to be worth the effort and frustration. Working in iNat is pleasurable, and one gets the feeling that the platform is stable by comparison. I would not bother combining with iSpot.
why would they remove notifications? that is so bizarre.
As an outside observer (by seeing old S. African record-migrants pop up in iNat), what does strike me is so many comradely interactions on those- it is bizarre to have had those disrupted. My sympathy to the community there.
I can also see the “shadows” of the records having species interactions through people’s interactions about those, and that does look like it was a fun/useful feature too.
I suspect bad/careless/indifferent management that gave an inadequate brief to a new (probably cheap) outsourced IT team that in turn didn’t think it necessary to learn what iSpot was all about and what the users required.
the inat devs do an amazing job. Maybe they don’t know i think about that because i have too many comments and opinions but they really do.
The main issue has been a bit of bad planning: When Ispot South Africa (Ispot.org.za) merged with Ispot.uk they ended up with three dictionaries for names. One each for South Africa, UK and the rest of the world. That means that something that occurs in two or more regions has to be coded separately. Thus you can find Elephants for South Africa but not simultaneously for the rest of Africa or India. Coding of names presumably too expensive and thus not up to date for several years.
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